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When you're right, you're right, and, in today's The Buckets, Greg Cravens gets it right.
I vented pretty thoroughly on my Braveheart/Babe theory a year and a half ago, but it's still relevant if you like a good rant and don't mind that the video at the end has disappeared. (Here it is, for that matter.)
The gist of it is that cinéastes praise mud as a sign of authenticity, even when it makes no historical or even logical sense, and that, consequently, "Babe" might well have beaten out "Braveheart" for the Oscar if they hadn't made the mistake of washing the pig.
(Note that, at the time the awards were being voted on, we didn't realize that there were actually two pigs in the running.)
Of course, the filth smeared all over everyone was not really the factor that earned Best Film for a ludicrously ahistorical film with one-dimensional villainy and B-grade acting. It got the largest vote from the Academy because it employed the largest share of Academy members.
Hollywood loves spectacles for exactly the opposite reason Cravens suggests that producers love zombie movies: Lots of jobs, lots of glitz, lots of money lavished on all corners of the industry.
And the public likes spectacles as well: If you offer a four-year-old a choice between an ice cream cone he might actually be able to finish and a gigantic, whipped-cream, nuts, jimmy, cherry-topped sundae that he won't, and which will make him sick as well, he's gonna go for the belly-ache.
In 1952, Cecil B. DeMille's bloated, deceptively titled "The Greatest Show on Earth" not only beat out "Ivanhoe" -- which I praised on that linked rant -- but also "Moulin Rouge," "The Quiet Man" and, saving the best for gasp, "High Noon."
Here's a list of 1952 films, and there are some terrific films on it that didn't even get nominated but were clearly better than the one that took home "Best Picture."
However, Buckets is advancing a different argument, that zombie films are popular with producers because they are cheap to make and, in fact, the exact opposite of a spectacular.
The principle is well-established: My last non-professional job was waiting tables at a dinner theater, where the featured show was "I Do, I Do," which is a terrific musical requiring only two actors and a three-piece band. And if only people would have come to eat cheap, bad food and watch "Zoo Story" or "Waiting for Godot," they wouldn't have had to pay the damn musicians.
As I've said before, I'm tired of zombies, though a suggestion then that I watch "Shaun of the Dead" yielded some laughs, mostly because its humor relies on the fact that zombie movies are really stupid. No argument there.
Similarly, what I like about today's strip is not the zombie reference but the slagging of the genre, because not only are zombie films cheap to make, but, if you are a cartoonist really stuck for a gag, you can always draw people stumbling around saying "Braaains" and consider your work done. Gotta give Cravens cred for finding a good gag in a tired topic.
The only thing more side-splitting than your average zombie gag is a tousled-looking woman standing in the doorway of her home with the steering wheel of a car in her hand saying, well, anything really. "Braaaains" isn't a punchline. What punchline? We don't got no punchline. And so forth.
Which brings us to the end of the kidding around for a moment, because Cravens' Shaun-of-the-Dead-level take on the subject raises an interesting issue: Do people actually like this stuff, or is it just favored by cheap and/or lazy creative types?
People want to be in on The Thing, whatever The Thing is. And the more the media proclaim something to be The Thing, the more it becomes The Thing.
And it's not that tiramisu isn't downright tasty, or that zumba isn't a fun way to get some good exercise. But the excitement over these things is way out of proportion to their actual value and includes substantial excitement over being part of The Thing.
If you own a restaurant, you're smart to put tiramisu on the menu for as long as it's The Thing and then, when people stop ordering it, take it off, just like you did with crème brûlée a decade ago. And, if you own a gym, do the same with zumba or kickboxing or Pilates or whatever. (BTW, the next big exercise thing is a combination of kickboxing and Pilates, known as "Punchious Pilates." Thanks, I'm here all week.)
So, from the point of view of selling a strip, doing zombie jokes is a good business decision. You won't plow any fresh ground, but look at TV: What sitcom do you see "plowing new ground"? Right: The one that got cancelled.
The nominees for this year's National Cartoonist Society awards, only one of which is actually called a "Reuben," were announced recently, and, in one forum, someone asked why there were awards for newspaper illustration in a competition for cartoonists.
Zombie gags are a pretty good answer: They are where cartooning and illustration intersect on the Grand Venn Diagram of Art That Pays The Rent.
If you can pay the rent without the circles touching, more power to you. But the real challenge -- since anyone with any mileage knows that that other goal is just silly -- is how do you create cartoons that are popular without simply pandering to fads?
Well, his biopic may not have won the Oscar, but Henri Toulouse-Lautrec managed to do with his art what Vincent Van Gogh (whose life spawned some better flicks) could not, and he did it without becoming Peter Max in the process.
Do that. But funnier.
Joel Pett makes the connection that has seemingly eluded other cartoonists. The use of Kermit Gosnell as an argument against keeping abortion legal boggles the mind.
To start with, the fact that he was on trial at all shows that what he was accused of doing was outside the law, and now his conviction underlines the fact.
And the bizarre notion that the "mainstream media" was ignoring the Gosnell trial rests on assertions that, without the full support of sheep-like, unquestioning illogic and gullibility, are laughably wrongheaded.
The claim falls apart when you look at the reach of Fox News and realize that they are very much a part of the "Mainstream Media," despite their contradictory claims to represent a large proportion of Americans and yet be outside the mainstream.
Fox's cable news network is the top rated cable network, and, while it may be because it's the only network serving those who demand a full-on paranoid, delusional view of the news, it's still getting the best numbers.
Granted, that's not the same as attracting a majority of all viewers. But you can bet they don't whine to potential advertisers about the size of their slice of the pie.
And beyond its cable channel, Fox has 25 owned-and-operated local TV stations and about 185 affiliate stations. By comparison, ABC has eight O&Os and 200 affiliates, CBS has 14 O&Os and "nearly 200" affiliates and NBC has 10 O&Os and "nearly 200" affiliates. Looks like parity to me.
For Fox to complain about being overshadowed by the "mainstream" networks is like the New York Jets complaining that they are facing a three-to-one disadvantage in their division.
There are many reasons the Jets haven't fulfilled Rex Ryan's promises of a berth in the Super Bowl, but being outnumbered is not one of them.
Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh's show is heard on nearly 590 radio stations, plus Armed Forces Radio. Glen Beck is on about 400 stations.
There may have been a time when the rightwing viewpoint was under-represented, but, if so, that moment has passed.
"Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
Not only does the "poor victims" argument rely on a paranoid, mathematically-challenged view of commercial media, but on a fundamental misreading of how it operates.
There is a difference between a story being "not reported" and a story being "suppressed" or "ignored."
The Gosnell story was, indeed, being reported within the region where it was happening.
It was below the national radar in large part because, not only were the other media sources not picking up on it, but neither were Fox, Limbaugh, Beck and the rest of their segment. Once the rightwing brought it to the forefront, it spiked on Google News and the remainder of the media picked up on it.
That's not called "revealing a media coverup." It's called "getting a scoop," or, in less flamboyant terms, "doing your job." Maybe the others missed it. What's your excuse, Fox?
Of course, calling it a scoop would suggest triumphing in fair competition and would undermine the "victim" mentality that keeps listeners from consulting other sources for alternative explanations of what's going on in the world.
Only we can tell you the truth. The others -- the Mainstream Media -- are part of the conspiracy, and are instructed by their overlords to lie.
So, from the general to the specific:
Specifically, it's Fox and the other rightwing media that should have been suppressing the Gosnell story if anyone did, because it serves the agenda of those who would keep abortion "legal, safe and rare."
I guess maybe you have to be over 50 to get it.
The younger crowd have heard about coathangers, and, yes, not only did it happen anecdotally, but I knew of a case within my own social circle, and she ended up in the emergency room with massive bleeding.
But that was only one desperate solution to a desperate situation in the days before Roe v Wade.
For girls who could confide in their parents, the more well-connected could go to their family doctor for a D&C, an outpatient procedure that was fully legal, except for the lack of candor in recording why it was performed.
For the rest, for those who didn't have parents they could talk to about such things, and a family doctor with a sense of personal loyalty and discretion, there were the back-alley butchers.
The Kermit Gosnells.
They were plentiful, and it wasn't that they invariably murdered or mutilated their clientele, any more than every drunk driver ends up wrapped around a lamp post every trip. But statistical probability does tend to catch up eventually.
And with no legal line between a safe, early abortion and a grotesque late term one, the back-alley abortionists were willing to do whatever the customer wanted, regardless of what it amounted to or how it turned out.
As in the case of Gosnell, their facilities were not always well-kept and germ-free, but, as his case illustrates, there were plenty of serious health risks simply in what they were willing to do.
Which, it must once more be said, is not legal today, even as safe, early abortions are.
To hold up the Gosnell case as an example makes perfect sense, if the lesson you are attempting to drive home is that we must never, ever go back to the horrors of the past, when Kermit Gosnells could be found in every city, catering to poor women and timorous co-eds.
What is particularly bizarre about this whole line of argument is that it comes from the same people who say that, if you restrict guns, it will empower criminals, that only decent, law-abiding people would ever give up their guns and so you shouldn't ask for background checks or waiting periods or restrict the types of guns or related equipment people can own.
Yet they make the argument that laws against the termination of pregnancy will be effective.
And their loyal followers nod and baa in chorus: "Four legs good, two legs better!"
No kidding, Harry Bliss. No kidding.
Thank goodness comics cover a variety of topics, although right now a substantial portion of them appear to be dedicated to depictions of Barrack Obama as Richard Nixon.
Many cartoonists avoid looking at other cartoons for fear of absorbing an idea and later inadvertantly using it without recalling that it wasn't their own.
Understandable. But, for political cartoonists, I'd suggest doing your sketch and then taking a gander at what else is already up there, to avoid doing the same freaking cartoon as every other cartoonist in the nation. I can certainly accept some coincidences on the first day of an issue, but, come on, guys. Enough Obama-as-Nixon.
Draw a weeping Statue of Liberty or something.
Note that this was a comment on artistry and not on politics. We're taking a break from politics today.
I've noted this before, but I gave copies of Norm Feuti's book, "Pretending You Care" -- which is not simply a collection of Retail strips but a book on working in retail, illustrated by strips -- to the Gen-X, mall-wise members of my family, and one of them responded that, while it was all true, it was too close to the bone to be "funny."
And that from the one with the most pronounced taste for gallows humor.
I found it hilarious but, yeah, completely true. Norm has stumbled over the fact that sometimes you can be absurd without exaggeration, and the only comic license taken here is that Cooper is simply more out front in his analysis than would be safe in the workplace.
The last two years I worked at one paper, HQ and HR got together to transform the annual review from a conversation between supervisor and subordinate into an endless time-wasting succession of trips into bureaucratic, one-size-fits-all hell. We had to do a self-assessment, which meant filling out a lengthy form some of whose questions applied (vaguely) to your actual work and some of which didn't in the least.
Then the form was reviewed by your boss and submitted, and then HR would send it back for revision, based on their need for everything to be complete even if it didn't apply, and for the relevant portions that you and your boss and anyone in your department could understand to be rewritten into something that a random chimpanzee would agree with, even if it no longer related to your duties and responsibilities.
The first year I had to do this, I answered the question about how I had improved safety -- a question obviously germane to the press room but less so for educational services -- by saying I had stowed all the boxes of stuff to avoid a tripping hazard. This was true because, in that year, I had been forced to move my office three times, but was by then in what was promised to be a permanent spot.
The next year, I had no safety improvements to report, but, by God, they kicked it back and insisted I come up with something. I suggested to my boss that I could say I made sure my shoe laces were always tied, but we eventually invented something that satisfied them.
And I got my three percent raise.
And there was much rejoicing.
Speaking of much rejoicing, here is some from the much-under-appreciated Watch Your Head, in which Quincy has finally gotten his degree from Otis and I'll bet is not going very far out into the world because (A) what would the strip be without him? and (B) we always had a few of those guys who couldn't quite cut the cord hanging around campus post-grad.
In this arc, not only is Quincy now a bachelor of something or other -- and nobody is more qualified by effort and experience to call himself a "bachelor" than Quincy -- but has hijacked the JumboTron for one last grand prank.
And, while we're on the topic of rapscallions and pranks:
Don Asmussen nails it by combining the IRS kerfuffle with the release of Wesley Snipes last month and the observation that, yeah, the Tea Party is probably going to get kid-gloves treatment going forward, at least for a little while.
And then there is the matter of Bea Arthur Naked. I can't keep up with everything, but apparently Asmussen can, and, yeah, not only is there a nude, unauthorized portrait of Bea Arthur but it just sold for $1.9 million. And the Daily Beast got kicked off Facebook for 24 hours for reposting it there.
Given that you can't make this stuff up, I'm impressed that Asmussen can make it funnier than it was to begin with.
I'm also impressed with Mike Baldwin's talent for happy coincidence:
Don't worry, lady. Nobody dares to post that stuff, at least not on Facebook.
Not the Daily Beast, not Frank Cho.
I'm thinking of writing a play called "No Tits, Please. We're Facebook."
While you wait for that to be released, here's a bit of musical entertainment from a sleazy, outlaw saloon that could only be more authentic if they found a relevant nude painting to hang up over the bar:
I always like Tom the Dancing Bug's Super-Fun-Pak Comix, but I particularly like the sidebar of garbage served up with this installment.
Fact is, I was hoping that somebody would post a cartoon today that was light and breezy and funny and would get me off the political kick for a bit.
In part because, when I start to find it tiresome, I can only imagine the effect on readers.
And in part because the past 24 hours have been a painful, ongoing example of how freaking gullible people can be and it depresses me. It's been building up longer than that, but the toxicity of stupidity -- the "and then they voted" aspect of it all -- comes particularly to the fore when the topic is not "Bill Gates will give you $5,000 if you share this" but more pointedly important credulous claims like "worst scandal since Watergate" or "the mainstream press is suppressing the news."
Yes, people still share this:
And this:
But they also share this sort of delusional populist faux-martyrdom, which is just as fraudulent and absurd and counterfactual, but politically inspired as well:
And so here we have a light, breezy, funny comic with a whole section devoted to how freaking gullible people can be, and we're right back to yesterday's rant.
Here's the deal: If somebody passes on the Bill Gates nonsense, or a three-year-old notice about a missing child who was actually back home safe and sound a day after the original message anyway, well, yeah, I wish they had the sense to check things out first.
And if they click on some "OMG! You Won't Believe This Naked Teen Chick!" link and end up taking a bogus survey instead, heh, tough luck, sucker.
But when they fall for some political myth intended to promote fear, hate and division in the country and help spread it around, I get annoyed that they didn't check it out, but, really, that's displaced anger: I should be angry with the disloyal, manipulative liars who post those things in the first place. And I am.
But, stepping aside from politics, what depresses me as a still-working journalist in a struggling industry is the click-bait that Bolling mocks in today's TTDB: The bogus links inserted by scummy advertisers on otherwise reputable news sites.
Yes, I'm old. I remember working for newspapers back when ads for X-rated movie theaters and strip joints were carefully examined and often rejected as inappropriate for our readership and when fraudulent ads were turned away completely.
And I remember talking to an editor from the flagship paper in the Ottaway chain, and laughing over the notion that, while our paper could screw up and it might never come to the attention of corporate, his paper landed on the doorstep of the CEO and all major officers each morning. He admitted it did tend to focus the mind.
So my question is, do the suits at HQ see this crap they're posting on their websites?
Are they proud to be promoting cheesy, soft-porn gossip and outright consumer fraud alongside the work of their newsrooms?
Or do they simply think it's clever marketing and a good way to monetize content, and never even think about what it does to the company's reputation and credibility?
Well, first of all, I've been close enough to the top in local management to know that the most blatantly half-assed ideas you'll see on the local web site were probably put there on orders from corporate.
I remember when Knight-Ridder ordered all their local sites taken down and converted to a generic piece of unnavigable crap that drove readers away in hordes, and I worked for a paper that had a decent start on on-line revenue but was ordered to stop and impose an HQ brainstorm that didn't work at all.
And I've certainly sat around enough conference tables to know that, if the ad director says the links are bringing in money, the person who says, "But do we really want to be involved in this stuff?" will not have a bright future in the organization.
Peter Drucker was hardly a bleeding heart socialist, but he did have the business sense to recommend that a company focus on its identity, on what it was about, what customers wanted from it, in setting its objectives.
And he didn't mean to sit around writing airy-fairy cotton candy mission statements.
Though, if you want something even funnier than that mission-statement generator, this site quotes Drucker in saying that a mission statement should fit on a T-shirt, and then lays out the lengthy, meeting-filled bureaucratic process for coming up with said "mission statement."
Focus, people: If you don't know why your business exists, you can't possibly succeed. And if you need to form a committee and schedule meetings and reviews to find out what the hell you're all there for, you're so lost it doesn't matter.
You might just as well promote a little fraud, insult the intelligence of your readers and generate as much revenue as you can however you can, and then duck out the door and cash out your stock options before the whole house of cards comes down.
Yeah, I knew something light and breezy and funny would cheer me up. Thanks, Ruben!
"Noone is trying to kill you," Clevinger said.
"Then why are they shooting at me?" Yossarian asked.
"They're shooting at everyone," Clevinger answered. "They're
trying to kill everyone."
"And what difference does that make?"
It's good to have both sides upset over revelations of selective IRS scrutiny and of the collection of telephone data from the phones of Associated Press reporters, even though it's a bit disconcerting to have conservative Dana Summers and liberal Tom Toles coming up with the same gag.
Technically, they're both off-target in that the Justice Department (reportedly) was only pulling records of who called whom and how long they talked, which I guess is not an actual wiretap but what, on Law & Order, they refer to as "pulling LUDs" and which, according to this source, requires a court order but which I'll bet is less hard to explain to a judge than a request for a wiretap.
Though it's not clear that the Justice Department would have a lot of trouble getting either. I suspect the issue is that they don't want to tie up a lot of time listening to actual conversations. They just want to know who's talking to the press and vice-versa.
Oh. Well, that's diffo!
There's something almost comforting about the apparently indiscriminate nature of the monitoring of reporter conversations: You don't have to worry about whether they're listening to you. They're listening to everyone.
And that's why reporters need to be outfitted with pre-paid disposable phones. So they can do their jobs.
It's predictable, perhaps, that an attack on the press would provoke this kind of unanimity. Response to the IRS scrutiny of Tea Party non-profit applications, by contrast, has been all over the place, from outraged fury to somewhat outraged bemusement.
Until more details emerge, I'm willing to chalk this one up as poor judgment by underlings. There was, in the period leading up to the election, a large increase in groups filing for 501c-4 status, and it seems logical to take a closer look at an application from a potentially political group than one from a homeowners' association or a small country airport, not for partisan reasons but because they are more apt to be noncompliant, given the fine distinctions between "working for social welfare" and actual, partisan campaigning.
And some applications may have been prepared by attorneys while others were being cobbled together by Joe the Plumber, such that, if you saw that a lot of those potentially partisan, frequently garage-built applications contained the words "Tea Party" and "patriot," it would be tempting to filter them out for a look-see.
It's just kind of ironic to try to locate knuckleheads with bad ideas without running your own bad idea up the chain of command, knucklehead.
It seems to come under the same category as assuming that, even though you're probably over the legal limit, since you don't feel drunk and you don't really live very far away, it's okay to drive yourself home.
You'll probably get away with it, so what the hell.
Once you've hit the pedestrian, well, we're gonna set aside all that reasonable, understandable logic and take a blood sample.
And, to extend the metaphor, we'll have some questions for the bartender, the political issue being whether we simply call him as a witness or seek to indict him for having not either cut you off earlier or taken your keys.
And so Pat Oliphant asks: "What did the bartender know, and when did he know it?"
Now, it is a sincere tribute to the deep, abiding respect conservatives clearly have for Obama's intellect and organizational capacity that they believe he is masterminding policy at the level where all this occurred.
It's as if they want to indict the owner of the holding company who appointed the CEO of the division that controls a chain of taverns, one of which employed the bartender who served the driver who drove the car that killed the pedestrian that lived in the house that Jack built.
That is not Watergate.
What got people poking around in Watergate was that one of the burglars was directly linked to a mid-level White House employee, and it very quickly developed that things were going on at a level at which -- in the days before Cheney transformed the office of vice-president -- it was nearly impossible to believe the president did not know about them.
What does work in Oliphant's cartoon is the shopping list: Benghazi is nothing and the IRS thing is overblown, but the AP matter starts to get closer to home and "Justice," though pretty vague, sums up a general disregard for privacy rights that bothers people on both sides of the aisle.
This list brings us into that "preponderance of evidence" zone, at which point it stops really mattering if the president was aware of this particular matter or that one. There is obviously a pattern of abusive behaviors, petty and major, that the person at the top of the chain has to accept as a reflection of his own poor leadership.
I got my first traffic ticket for running a red light. It was a place where there were really two intersections less than half a block apart, the result of a Colorado University exit not quite across from a local road entrance, so that I went through the first, green, light without noticing that the second light was not coordinated with it and was, in fact, red.
I told the judge this, hoping it would mitigate the fine, but instead, he told me he would have rather I said that I saw the red light and didn't care and went through it on purpose, than have me admit that I hadn't even noticed it.
Nixon was a crook and a liar and a bigot and a fascist, but at least the things he did, he by-god did on purpose.
And, besides that, he was pretty unlikeable.
I like Obama. He's a nice guy, he's articulate, he's smart, he's funny, he's got a great wife and apparently nice kids. And I think he wants to do the right things.
But the best you can say about him at this point is that he hasn't done anything remotely close to justifying impeachment and that, anyway, probably whoever was president would be screwing it up.
And the problem with saying that is that it wasn't that Nixon was worse -- he was.
The problem is that it didn't hurt to kick Nixon around.
On Flunking a Nice Boy Out of School
I wish I could teach you how ugly
decency and humility can be when they are not
the election of a contained mind but only
the defenses of an incompetent. Were you taught
meekness as a weapon? Or did you discover,
by chance maybe, that it worked on mother
and was generally a good thing --
at least when all else failed -- to get you over
the worst of what was coming. Is that why you bring
these sheepfaces to Tuesday?
They won't do.
It's three months work I want, and I'd sooner have it from the
brassiest lumpkin in pimpledom, but have it,
than all these martyred repentances from you.
-- John Ciardi
One of my favorite kinds of joke is the kind that plants a naughty, inescapable giggle, almost like an ear worm, so that it pops up every time you see the trigger.
I don't find the stick-figure families on the back windows of cars all that obnoxious. It's not bragging, like the honor-role kid stickers, or suggesting against all experience and rational thought that, if I hadn't known there was a baby in the car, I would have decided to smash into it.
But it does contain an element of "Why are you telling me this? Don't you have any real friends?" I don't care how many kids you have or their genders, and I assume that anyone who did care would already know.
Now, thanks to Rabbits Against Magic, I understand why people put those stickers on their cars, and I'll remember, each time I pull up behind one of them.
As the father of a pair of varsity goalkeepers, I am aware that there are two schools of thought when it comes to selecting a jersey. The keeper's jersey has to be a different color than both his and the opposition team's field jerseys, so that the referees can pick him out, since there are special rules for keepers, beginning with the obvious one of being able to use hands to control the ball.
So the philosophical, psychological choices are a dull jersey that blends in and makes it harder for opposition players to track the keeper in their peripheral vision, or a very bright jersey that will tend to make them shoot at, rather than past, the keeper.
I didn't realize until today's Pardon My Planet that superheroes face the same choice.
It does occur to me that, unless you can deflect bullets, there's no particular advantage in luring bad guys into shooting right at you.
But I will say the design of the majority of Superhero Spandex onesies does seem to be based on the notion that drawing direct fire is a very good thing.
Finally, I will confess to having written yesterday's CSOTD the morning before, since I was heading out for an overnight Mother's Day visit, so I missed the start of this arc at Candorville. Here are the first two strips and it looks to me like something worth following.
"The Greatest Generation" won the war against the Axis, but the untold story is that some of them devoted themselves at the same time to a second battle.
Those purposeful, organized efforts notwithstanding, the war also had the effect of building support for civil rights by forcing a degree of integration that hadn't existed before:
When Cpl. Rupert Trimingham wrote a letter to Yank about being forced, while traveling in uniform, to get his lunch from the back door of a Texas diner while German POWs ate at the counter, it touched off a firestorm of supportive letters from white GIs, was fictionalized with a short story in the New Yorker and became a radio drama by Orson Welles. It has since appeared several times in historic fiction such as "The Tuskegee Airmen." (Trimingham was not in that unit.)
I spoke with Trimingham's daughter a few years ago and she said she barely knew anything about it, except that she'd heard he once wrote this letter that got a lot of response. She told me that he was not, in the years that followed, particularly active in the Civil Rights Movement or a rebel of any sort.
But that's the small, daily sort of contribution that broke the back of Jim Crow, and the fact that Trimingham's letter went viral is secondary, in many ways, to the fact that he wrote it. We don't know how many other letters were written and didn't get such attention; that was the one that did.
There's a whole passle of stories being written now, in the wake of the release of "42," the new Jackie Robinson biopic, about Wendell Smith, the sportswriter for the Pittsburgh Courier, and I've heard interviews in which his role is "revealed."
Piffle.
His role has long been known to anyone who cared to look into the story of Jackie Robinson, anyone willing to go beyond the Accepted Notion that white America just suddenly realized there was injustice going on and so of course moved quickly to fix it. That's the "please let us off the hook" school of history and it's a load of self-serving hogwash.
It is true that Wendell Smith promoted Robinson to Branch Rickey, and became Robinson's press agent on behalf of the Dodgers, to help ease the transition to an integrated game.
But Smith didn't pull Rickey's name out of a hat. Branch Rickey was on an existing committee to study the integration of Major League Baseball, a committee formed at the behest of another black sportswriter, Sam Lacy, whose influence in changing perceptions within his profession is exemplified by an incident in covering a pre-season game in New Orleans where, as a Negro, he was forced to sit on the roof of the pressbox rather than inside. Several of the white writers grabbed their typewriters and folding chairs and joined him.
The important message is that social progress does not "just happen," nor do the Rosa Parkses and the Jackie Robinsons and the Martin Luther Kings rise up from unplowed, unplanted, uncultivated soil.
Not only does it take the groundwork of the Wendell Smiths and Sam Laceys and the Thurgood Marshalls and James Farmers, but it relies on the small daily affirmations of dignity and the small daily demands for respect and the small daily statements of "not any more" depicted in today's Candorville and that I hope we're going to see in the rest of this arc.
German cartoonist Heiko Sakurai offers a commentary on the difficulty of spotting terrorists, or, perhaps, of defining terrorism.
I don't have a specific solution to the security issues, but I know this: The policy of "jail them all and let God sort them out" is immoral, antidemocratic and ineffective.
Obama has stated, rightly, that Guantanamo is a powerful al Qaeda recruiting tool, but, having said that, what are you gonna do about it?
Nothing? Can we not, in the current climate, even release the ones whose names have been cleared?
Apparently not.
Worse yet, it doesn't just create new militants. It fosters support for them within communities that would otherwise shun their excesses. Militancy cannot succeed without community support.
When I hear the outrageous, bigoted comments about Islam that emerge on the Internet and talk radio, I fear that this hateful, ignorant attitude has already spread from a small group of dangerously demented morons to a public that has been whipped into a frenzy of fear and is searching for the easy answers people always look for.
Which is to say, I'm less worried about the terrorist with the backpack than about the terrorist with the microphone and the friends in Congress.
I don't have an answer, but here's what I know: I surely could have gotten myself into some serious trouble, if the zero-tolerance attitude that prevails today had been in place back in the early 1980s. And I more than suspect that my experience has its parallels today.
I was in an Irish ballad group that was nationalist, though not indiscreetly or violently so. But "neutrality" isn't neutral. Neutrality itself is a political position.
We sang the songs the ex-pat Irish wanted to hear, but, at the same time, we tried to avoid attracting pot-bellied buffoons in bawneen sweaters, those American wannabes who had no idea what was going on in the Six Counties but were delighted and excited that it was.
I came into things knowing that the IRA newspaper, an Poblacht, was likely spinning the news to their own benefit, and I scoffed at those who believed what it said.
But the same reports appeared in The Irish Echo, which was much more of a Paddy-in-America sort of publication, decrying the drunkard jokes of St. Patrick's Day but still devoted to the wee little shamrock and promoting NYC-area corned-beef-and-cabbage dinners at this or that Police Benevolent Society or parish fundraiser.
And the scary stories of British and Unionist atrocities reported in the Irish Echo were confirmed by the ex-pats I knew, who came from the North of Ireland and were not only getting reports from back home but had experienced some of the violence and excesses first hand.
They didn't think arming the IRA was a solution, and we sang songs of anger and sorrow, but not the ones that advocated bombing.
Today, even that tepid level of objection would make us terrorists. I look at stories of Muslims being hauled away for "supporting terrorism" and think, lord, that could have been me.
Yes, we opposed internship without habeas corpus, without being able to see the evidence against you. We opposed the "enhanced interrogation" that went on in Long Kesh and other prisons. We objected to people being denied the rights of criminals but also being denied the protections of the Geneva Convention.
And we weren't alone.
Not for them a judge and jury,
nor indeed a trial at all:
Being Irish means you're guilty,
so we're guilty, one and all!
There was support for the prisoners, and for their families, because the prisoners were often simply hauled out of bed and thrown into Long Kesh because of the neighborhoods they lived in or the people they knew or ... well, no reason that would stand up in court, if there'd been any courts involved.
Cardinal O'Fiaich told me of coming home at night and stopping at a roadblock. He was waved through, but two young men who were out of their car and being searched cried out "Father! Don't go! They'll murder us!" and so he pulled over, simply to bear witness, because driving on might indeed have meant the disappearance of the pair, into the prisons or maybe just into the nowhere that people sometimes disappeared to in those days.
And he didn't tell it as "this terrible thing that happened" but as "this is the sort of thing that happens all the time."
It's important to note that it wasn't Maggie Thatcher's "murder is murder is murder" Iron Lady approach, nor the tough-guy policies of her predecessors, that broke the hold of terror and violence on the Six Counties.
It was the relentless, non-violent but supportive work of people like the Cardinal, and the Peace People, and the groups that worked to get young people from both communities together for soccer matches and other social reasons, and it was jobs. It was the chance for young men to work for a wage rather than hang out on the streets, unemployed, that broke the hold of the militants of both sides.
Terrorism is real, and it's a lot less localized today than it was a generation ago, when most of the IRA and Unionist violence remained in the ghettoes of Belfast and Derry, and when the most of the excesses of government response were equally kept within those areas.
That is, we heard about the killing of Aery Neave and Lord Montbatten, and the government killings on Bloody Sunday and at Gibraltar, but we didn't hear about the almost daily minor atrocities of life, the mundane horrors of which Yeats wrote, "Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart."
So when I see crackdowns on those who "sympathize with the terrorists," I wonder how the government differentiates between a call for armed jihad and a call for common garden-variety justice and fair play?
Make no mistake: There are real terrorists.
But who are they? And how do you identify them without inflicting the kind of collateral damage on a whole community, and on a whole system of democracy, that keeps their perverted mission alive?
Force-feeding hunger strikers doesn't solve the underlying problem.
And neither does force-feeding the public.
I thought I'd use this Mother's Day as a chance to look at a pair of nostalgic comic strip families, to supplement the coverage of contemporary mothers in today's funny pages.
JR Williams "Out Our Way" launched with the nostalgia pre-loaded in the 20s, since he was purposely pitching to the grownups and basing much -- but by no means all -- of his humor of their childhood rather than contemporary times.
These cartoons, by the way, are dated from the early 1950s, but are from a "Re-Drawn by Request" collection, so may actually date from just about any time before that. And, BTW, Williams sometimes requested these re-runs himself, but he had a pretty good eye for the good stuff.
Motherhood seemed a constant battle against chaos, and he had a whole line of cartoons based on that idea, which he called "Why Mothers Get Gray."
In that world, little boys were constantly coming up with great schemes to solve problems, even if the problems were never quite as great as the schemes.
Somehow, mothers just didn't appreciate genius, even when it was directed towards making her life easier.
Gosh, you'd think they'd appreciate that kind of help, but mothers are just always finding fault. Who can explain it? Even when you do the chore you were told to do, they aren't satisfied.
Picky, picky, picky.
Nor are the kids the only reason mothers get gray:
The family in "Out Our Way" did a little bit of changing with the times -- there were TV jokes in the 50s, for example -- but they didn't grow and age.
That was not the case with "Freckles and his Friends," which launched in 1915, about seven years before "Out of Way." At that stage, Freckles was a very small boy:
You'll note that the strip doesn't mind giving Mom a little shot here. Freckles was a good kid, but he and his folks went back and forth on various things and his mother, while not the constant font of patience and wisdom of the mother in "Out Our Way," was far from the silly flibberty-gibbet of some strips. Both she and the mother in Williams' strip could balance a checkbook and run a family budget.
Meanwhile, Freckles and his eponymous friends grew, if not in real time, pretty steadily, and became adolescents with not only a sense of adventure but a talent for getting into scrapes. There was a little bit of Tom Swift or the Hardy Boys in these middle years.
Okay, it's Nutty's mom, not Freckles', who shows a little hip wisdom in this 1935 strip, but that calm, together approach was also Mrs. McGoosey's way.
A decade later, the Freckles gang was in full teen blossom, with teen adventures similar to those of Archie Andrews, who debuted in 1941, not, apparently as an attempt to match Freckles but to coattail on the popularity of Andy Hardy. The trio of Freckles, Archie and Andy are not terribly dissimilar.
Notice two things here: One is that, while Freckles has grown into a mature teenager, his little brother doesn't appear to have aged at the same pace.
More relevant to the day, however, is the observation that, 32 years after she first appeared, Mother McGoosey looks about that much younger, having become more fashionable and attractive than in her earlier incarnation.
If you haven't seen enough Mom-and-family cartoons, Liza Donnelly has created a slide-show collection of her work on the topic for the occasion, which you can find here. Here's a sample, and then here's some more, with a nice short essay about her own mom:
I like this Mark Fiore piece a lot, but I don't think it's a comic. (You'll have to go watch it there, since he has disabled embedding. We'll talk about that another day. Go.)
So I don't know that it fits the mission of the blog, but I do know that it's a very clever takeoff, not so much on TV ads as on the little animated pieces that appear on corporate websites, right down to the calm-but-emotional tone of voice, and if that seems like an oxymoron, play it again, because the voice is chosen and modulated to sound in control but to keep you fully engaged.
It's the same vocal trick used to tell you that coal burns cleanly, or that the fact that your 401k includes a minor, non-voting share in Exxon means you, too, own an oil company and therefore have no business criticizing the environment-destroying imperialistic robber barons who actually call the shots.
And it's a tick down from the still-controlled-but-more-compelling voice in a political commercial that expresses disillusionment and fear and your need to tell Senator Wassisface that you oppose clean air, feeding hungry children, voting rights or whatever it is they are spending money to avoid.
Of course, part of why the piece works is because it not only mocks the self-serving animations being parodied, but takes advantage of their strategies to work against uncaring corporate greed. It's a nicely executed piece of forensic jiu-jitsu.
So, is it a comic? Does it fit the mission of the blog?
Well, it's certainly not a comic strip, but let's accept that, title of the blog not withstanding, we look at a lot of panels here in addition to actual by-definition strips.
And we use "cartoon" to mean the static thing, not the animated thing. We don't run Spongebob or Powerpuff Girls or vintage Bugs Bunny cartoons, except as little video post-scripts at the end. That kind of "cartoon" is not part of what we (by whom we mean "I") do here.
But there are plenty of the-kind-we-do cartoonists turning their strips into the-kind-we-don't-do, and this is a good chance to note why we don't.
Because I don't like them.
So there you have it. Thanks for stopping by.
For those who are still here, some elaboration:
I like the timing of a comic strip. It's like volleyball: Serve, prompt, return, and you only have a limited number of touches to get it back over the net before the point is lost (and that's an excellent but unintentional pun).
Even a single static piece, a panel, has timing. I don't know how much of it is intentional and how much is instinctive, but it does, and there are different ways of creating the flow that leads from seeing it to getting it.
For instance, anyone can do a weeper in the wake of tragedy. Mauldin's commentary on the Kennedy assassination is a classic because of timing:
First, you see the sorrow. Then you see the "symbol of America." Then you realize it is one murdered president grieving another. And one man, grieving another.
That increasing awareness is what gives this classic its depth and distinguishes it from the hordes of mundane, forgettable weeping Statues of Liberty on 9/12/01.
But even a panel on a less portentous topic involves that gradual shift from seeing it to getting it.
This Drew Litton cartoon is also a classic, though only in Denver, and, now, only among those who were Bronco fans 30 years ago.
You see the stadium and the ridiculous goal posts, and then the 3 on the kicker and you realize it is Rich Karlis, who had been matchless as a placekicker but, as this cartoon appeared, was mired in a streak of hitting the uprights on crucial attempts.
You had to be there, of course, but that insider element makes it more delicious: The fun of "getting it" when you know that others will not.
And sometimes, the timing is deliberately drawn out, as with Peter Arno's famous panel, which takes a minute to sink in, and which some will never get, but has lasted half a century because the laugh is the result of some effort on the reader's part:
The element of timing is more obvious in a strip, because the panels force you to take things in sequentially:
This 2005 Arlo & Janis is a favorite because you walk past the yard along with Arlo and the tension builds in part because he's taking it all in, but also on a meta-level because three panels go by and he only has one panel left in which to deliver the punchline, at which point the understatement -- coupled with the upside-down dog -- makes it that much funnier.
The late Jerry Bittle was a master of timing, but I'll admit to using this particular cartoon to let you know that "Shirley & Son" has recently begun a new cycle of reruns at GoComics and it's a good time to jump in.
However, it's also an excellent example of why I hate animated comic strips.
Okay, granted I'm a certified loner, but I don't think I'm the only person who doesn't like having somebody read over his shoulder, and I'm even more sure that I'm not the only person who hates when someone shows you something they think you should read, but then, instead of just handing it to you and letting you read it, puts it in front of you and proceeds to read it aloud, pointing to the words.
I loved having my dad read me the Sunday funnies when I was four years old. But with all due respect to him and to Fiorello LaGuardia and to the Comic Weekly Man, I can read now.
Just hand me the thing and then sit back, shut up and drink your coffee.
Not only is it annoying as hell, but I don't want to be stuck with your take on what is supposed to be an internal process.
First of all, what does Louis's voice sound like? What does Emily's voice sound like? I'm not sure I can articulate it, but I know they don't sound like you.
Most of all, however, timing is personal in this art form, and when you read it aloud, you force your timing on me.
It is a perceptual spoiler.
It destroys what makes comic strips work.
There's nothing wrong with animated cartoons, if they are created as animated cartoons. Which, in this case, Mark Fiore has done.
But make up your mind: If you want to do comics, do comics. Strips or panels, I love'em both.
If you want to be Chuck Jones or Fritz Freleng, do that.
Please. I'd love to see somebody do things like this on a regular basis:
(What do you mean, "You got the voices wrong?")
There are a few Benghazi cartoons making fun of the hyperinflation being brought to this non-event, but I think John Cole got it best.
I mean, are we really not supposed to be able to see past the scary mask? Maybe if it were bigger. Maybe if it even began to somewhat fit.
And yet there it is. Count Floyd, political analyst.
It's important that someone find out how many people are falling for this ridiculous smear effort, because I can no longer judge the gullibility of the American people.
Here's what I've figured out so far:
The anti-Clinton campaign funded by Richard Scaife was able to find some credible material by casting a wide net. The "Hilary murdered Vince Foster" nonsense fell flat, but Whitewater was a good piece of propaganda, since commercial real estate is a slippery beast to begin with.
Specifically, since a lot of people have purchased a house, they feel they understand how real estate works, but residential transactions are heavily loaded with consumer protections, since the law recognizes that one party is inexperienced and requires disclaimers and transparency.
Commercial real estate, by stark contrast, is a full-contact sport in which it is assumed that both parties know the rules, which is that there aren't a lot of rules. Nearly any commercial deal of any magnitude could result in investigations and convictions if you chose to parse every clause and every unspoken agreement. The Number One Rule of making a deal is that nobody talks about the deal.
So Whitewater got plenty of traction, not just from the rightwing but from mainstream media and a good segment of the general public, until they finally actually showed their hand.
At which point, business writers looked at the cards and said, "You've got nothing. All commercial development deals look like this."
The shrugs were not effective in turning public opinion, but the courts also saw that there was no there there and, while a couple of people got minor convictions for not crossing a T or dotting an i, Whitewater dwindled down to nothing.
And then they pulled out Monica Lewinsky and proved that -- gasp! -- a powerful man had enjoyed consensual sex with an adult woman not his wife. And they got him to fib about it and they managed to drag that somewhat standard denial into the Congress.
They got their impeachment but no conviction, but they had made the point that conservative, god-fearing America will not tolerate a politician who cheats on his wife and lies about his infidelity.
Unless, y'know, he runs for office, in which case a trip to Argentina becomes indistinguishable from a hike on the Appalachian Trail, as noted by Christopher Weyant in the New Yorker's daily cartoon yesterday.
Clinton or Sanford, the whole adultery thing is a matter of much hand-wringing and not much caring.
And today Bill Clinton is doing just fine, his wife is doing even better and the American Spectator has been out of business for a dozen years and Richard Scaife wasted his millions.
The only positive that emerged from all that for the conspirators was that, when Hilary Clinton said there was a vast right-wing conspiracy, everyone laughed, so that future right-wing conspiracies could continue to go forward without a lot of kneejerk opposition against which to prove themselves.
So what are the Koch Brothers and Murdoch and the rest of the Unholy Alliance getting for their money this time around?
The whole birther thing -- like the Vince Foster murder case -- kind of degenerated into obvious screwballism.
Obamacare, by contrast, has a certain Whitewater appeal in that healthcare funding is easily as impenetrably opaque as commercial real estate development, with the advantage that while, in order to be useful, Whitewater had to result in serious legal charges, there doesn't have to be any actual denouement with Obamacare: We can kick around competing financial models forever.
As has been noted many times, if you laid every economist in the country end to end, they wouldn't reach a conclusion, so this one can remain a partisan game in which everyone gets to believe whatever they want, including that it was a good thing when Romney proposed it, but a bad thing now that Obama has gotten it passed.
But, while bitching about Obamacare helps against Democrats in general, it's not very useful against Hilary, and so we're dragging out that stained blue dress and putting Benghazi under the microscope.
This graphic has been circulating on Facebook for a few days. I'm not sure of the numbers. I've seen different figures as well, but it's certainly, clearly true that the attack on the Benghazi consulate or CIA spook shack or whatever it was hardly stands out as unique over the past decade.
And I've always felt it was a little unfair to assume that Bush and Rice should have necessarily picked out the warnings about 9/11 from the stacks of CIA intelligence briefings that no doubt came before them, though the assassination of the head of the Northern Alliance two days earlier should probably have prompted some "where are we at with this?" curiosity.
It's equally unfair to assume that everything happening at every moment in Benghazi was being laid on the President's table. Either the man is both omniscient and omnipresent or he's not, and, if he is, then Bush was, too, and is responsible for everything that went wrong on his watch.
Benghazi is nothing.
1. It is not unique. Whatever the actual numbers prove to be, there have been many other attacks on American consulates with greater loss of life.
2. It sure seems like it was the aforementioned CIA spook shack. If so, that would explain some conflicting cover stories in the hours and days that followed. It would also suggest that the party that outed Valerie Plame for political advantage and that revealed classified information about Benghazi in a committee hearing should shut its pie hole.
3. As for "whistleblowers," the term does not simply mean people who are willing to bitch and moan about the boss. If that's what it means, then any business with more than 8 employees has at least three "whistleblowers" who could come forward and testify. You're thinking of "Monday morning quarterbacks."
So the question is not "What happened in Benghazi?"
The question is, for all the willingness of the GOP fringe, talk radio and rightwing cartoonists to flog this thing, is anyone actually buying it?
